She’ll Talk When She Has something to Say
by Dennis Vannatta
1
The Barlows were a strange family, oddly mismatched, strangers to each other, strangers, some of them, to themselves.
Well, maybe Fran Barlow, the matriarch of the family, wasn’t so strange. She was just tired, physically and every other way a woman of forty who looked ten years older could be tired. She was assistant manager of a Rustlers Burgers franchise, working the swing shift, which was the best part of her day. There, amidst the irate customers and sulky employees, the wonky soda machine and the women’s toilet daily clogged with flush-proof Tampons, she could put her mind in neutral, or if not neutral some gear that allowed purposeful activity without reference to what awaited her at home: that is, Barlows.
She loved them, of course. A matriarch has to love her family, even if she did once in a low moment say to a coworker, “There’s nothing wrong with my family that a well-placed funeral or two wouldn’t cure.” Joking, of course, and no sooner said than regretted, because what calamity might she have brought down on her loved ones? Twofunerals? Neither of her children could be included, so that would mean one would have to be her husband, Perry, an all-too-real prospect for a funeral (prostate cancer. surgery? chemo? radiation? decision yet to be made). Please God, no funeral for Perry, exasperating as he could be. Her sister, though . . .
Sally Pine wasn’t a Barlow, of course. To this day, Fran resisted thinking of her as part of the family even though their son, Douglas, twelve years old, could hardly remember the family before his aunt came to live with them; and for Halo, almost five, Sally had always been living in the room Perry fashioned for her out of what had once been the attic, where she’d sometimes go days at a time without emerging, “like someone out of a Brontë novel,” Douglas said. Precocious Douglas was the reader in the family. Perry didn’t see much point to reading unless it was some sort of instruction manual, and there weren’t enough hours in Fran’s day for it. As for Halo, she was too young, at least they supposed, but how was one to know? Halo certainly never said. Fran had once or twice caught Sally reading some New Age crap. Goddamn refugee-from-the-Sixties airhead.
Actually, Sally was too young by several decades to be a refugee from the Sixties although she desperately wanted to be. She’d spent much of her adult life searching for an appropriately Sixtyish commune and found several that seemed to do the trick, living for a few months to a few years in this one or that one until the patriarchal inevitability at the heart of each began to weigh on her. Then she’d be off searching once more.
No, Sally wasn’t gay. “Sure, I gave lesbianism a try, but I’m just not wired that way. And, no, I don’t hate men. Men in their uncorrupted state are just fine. But I’m not going to be chained to anybody.”
“Hey, those chains get a bad rap,” Perry said, putting his arm around Fran and giving her a hug before she elbowed him away. “Maybe you should give marriage a try.”
“I did. I married that commune in the White Mountains.”
Yes, she claimed to have married the whole commune, which neither Fran nor Perry for an instant doubted.
Fran, who’d sat there like an idol with a migraine as Sally gave them an overview of her life, or what she could remember of her life in the decade since they’d last seen her, finally squeezed out between clenched teeth, “You could try settling down, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you for once in your life just try settling down?”
“Bingo! That’s why I’m here,” Sally said.
Seven years later, she still was.
It was the only thing she’d ever stuck to in her life, Fran said, “the silly bitch.”
The hell of it was, Sally seemed happy up in the attic. If only she were miserable, felt that itch to fly free which from her earliest days had been her defining characteristic, Fran might have gotten her off her hands. But no. “I’ve had enough of out there,” Sally said, fluttering her hands vaguely as if she were shewing off what she’d been chasing for decades: parts unknown, the lure of the untried, men, drugs.
Sally claimed to have given up alcohol for pot when she was fourteen, which Fran disputed. Sally had been smoking pot way earlier than fourteen. And pot for her hadn’t been so much a gateway drug as an open-border policy. She tried a little bit of everything and a lot of some things, but it wasn’t until her last commune, the one somewhere north of California and south of Oregon, she said, that she got hooked on beautiful heroin, and that scared her. She came home, to Fran’s home, that is, the closest thing she had to a home, their folks being dead. “I’ve had enough of out there.”
Would they ever be rid of her?
She was family but not quite family—an “adjunct member,” Douglas called her.
“That sounds about right,” Perry said. “She’s a piece of junk you add on,” to which Fran laughed as she hadn’t laughed in years although she wasn’t sure if Perry was trying to be funny or just didn’t know what adjunct meant. He was awful ignorant.
Like when Sally was in one of her stay-in-her-room spells and Fran would take a tray of food up and leave it outside her door, Perry accused Fran of being a “user.”
“I think you mean enabler, Pop,” Douglas said but then realized he might make his father feel bad by pointing out his error and grew flustered and blushed and waved his hands like he was trying to erase his words and stammered, “but that’s OK, that’s all right, that’s just fine. I mean, I guess there’s not much difference between an enabler and a user, depending on how you look at it, if you see what I mean,” and only stopped babbling on when Fran, who’d almost laughed at the beginning, ended by taking her son in her arms and stroking his sandy-blond buzz cut.
Douglas had thick, naturally wavy hair and could have been a real doll except he didn’t have enough time for tending hair. He had too much to do taking care of the family.
Douglas was the adviser to the uncertain, the comforter to the afflicted, the mediator when family conflicts flared. Often—though certainly not always—his efforts found some success. But at what price to Douglas? He was so invested in his struggles to ease the way for others that there was little left for himself. Beyond the self-sacrificing Douglas, was there even a Douglas there?
Fran worried about him, maybe more than she did any member of the family. Perry, of course, had cancer, but that wassomething at a distance as far as she was concerned, something that transpired between his urologist’s office and the hospital where he’d go for treatment of some kind, once that was decided. She’d get down to serious worrying about Perry when the time came, but that time had not yet arrived. Sally? Ha! She’d worry that Sally was going to eat them out of house and home, worry that she’d never move out of their home, but worry worry? Aggravating, that was Sally.
Halo, though. Fran should worry about her, but instead of worrying, she wondered. Everybody else—family, friends, teachers, doctors—wondered about her, too. Like, why did Halo always appear to be so happy? It seemed almost perverse, somehow.
Halo. Blame Fran for the name. She’d chosen Douglas for her first-born, named after his grandfather, thinking that grounding him in a tradition would give him strength, resiliency. But the ink was no sooner dry on his birth certificate than she became aware of the names of other boys his age and saw that the time of the Douglases and Davids and Ronalds was past, and in this new world of Thads and Chads and Lukes she’d hung that clunky old name on him like an anchor on a boy learning to swim.
She wouldn’t make the same mistake with her daughter. She’d pick a name to ride the crest of the coming wave, not one of the trendy Helens or Jordans or Madisons because the trendy is soon passé. Something newer than trendy. Why not Halo?
Jesus wept. Halo was neither trendy nor trend-setting. It was merely, disastrously, other. Halo was apart, like no other family member, no other child.
Halo did not speak. Almost five years old, she’d never uttered a word. When she was three, a specialist examined and tested her and pronounced her hearing just fine and her intelligence just fine, and she had no physical impairment. “Don’t worry about it,” he concluded. “She’ll talk when she has something to say.” For a year they’d repeat “She’ll talk when she has something to say” like a mantra, with a shrug and a little smile as if it were really almost amusing. By now, though, Halo almost five, the doctor can’t hide his concern, and only Douglas, desperate for it to be true, still repeats the mantra, with a smile that looks more like a grimace.
It was the name that caused it—that ludicrous Halo—and Fran had only herself to blame. So what if Halo seemed happy, the happiest of them all? Fran still worried about her, piling that worry on top of all the other worries.
Will the day ever come when Fran can say the hell with all of them and worry about herself?
She doesn’t drink or do drugs. Often she wishes she did.
2
Perry didn’t tell Fran he’d made an appointment to see his urologist to announce his decision—surgery, chemo, or radiation—until the Wednesday morning he was walking out the door.
“Well, I’m going to see Dr. Kuhn.”
Then he let the screen door slap shut behind him, strode straight across the yard to his pickup, and climbed in without once looking back.
Probably they should have talked through an issue like that together, husband and wife. But Perry wasn’t much of a talker. Fran wasn’t, either. She generally just wanted to put her feet up when she was finished with work and all her chores at home and was content to let him worry about that decision. Besides, she’d lay money he was going to put it all off on Dr. Kuhn. Perry was boss in his small-engine repair shop and would put his two cents in about what to watch on TV, but other than that he wasn’t big on making decisions.
She met him at the door when he got home two hours later, and he simply said with a shrug, “Radiation.”
That was what she’d expected. Not the radiation—she had no idea which treatment it’d be—but the shrug. Perry never made a big deal out of anything.
Still, he’d seemed different somehow. If she had to put a word to it, she’d say he seemed sort of “dreamy.” As if that made any sense.
But she didn’t have time to think any more about it because it was her day off from Rustlers Burgers, which meant she had a thousand chores to catch up on at home, and anyway Perry almost immediately went out to his shop, the converted garage to the side of the house.
She’d forgotten the dreamy look by dinner time when they all gathered around the big tureen of fried wieners and sour kraut. Fran asked Halo about her day at pre-school, and Halo smiled happily because she had a lot of friends there who, Mrs. Simmermaker said, were delighted to do her talking for her. Then, because silences at the dinner table made him nervous, without being asked Douglas started in on a long discourse about his day. When he wound down, Fran added her bit—the call on her day off about the dad-blasted ice-cream machine being on the fritz again. Finally, Sally, Queen of the Airheads, who’d deigned to join them for dinner, began blah-blah-blahing about something she’d seen on a Dr. Phil rerun, but Fran wasn’t listening because she’d finally glanced over at Perry. And there was that look.
Even Sally noticed something. She reached across the plate of homemade sweet pickles and laid her many-ringed hand on Perry’s.
“So, Perry, what did you decide?”
Shrug: “Radiation.”
“Oh, good,” Sally said. “I’m so glad you chose radiation. There’s something almost spiritual about it. Not like chemotherapy. You don’t want to put chemicals into your body. Trust one who knows. And surgery? Ugh. Don’t go under that knife.”
Even before his aunt had finished, Douglas had begun squirming in his chair, and as soon as Sally’s “knife” was out, he launched into an enthusiastic if rambling encomium on the virtues of radiation.
Halo smiled sweetly as she listened to her brother, whom she adored.
Sally, staring intently at Perry, interrupted Douglas.
“You look different somehow, Perry. Something’s happened.”
Perry hated to be the center of attention, and normally he would have ignored Sally and continued his attack on his food. Instead, he lowered his fork and averted his eyes, not shyly so much as modestly.
“Something did happen,” Sally said breathlessly. “I knew it. Tell us.”
Perry sat his fork down and folded his hands. Cleared his throat.
“Well, it wasn’t much, really. Just a funny little thing. Not funny ha ha, but, you know.”
He paused, but nobody said anything, so he cleared his throat again and continued.
“It was just this old guy. I’d just left the clinic and I was walking across the parking lot to my pickup, and there was this old guy, sixty maybe, I don’t know, and he was standing at the edge of the parking lot. Just a regular looking guy, dressed in regular clothes. Well, I’m about to get into my pickup, and he says something to me. ‘Say what?’ I said because I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right, wasn’t even sure he was talking to me. But he said it again. ‘You’re all right. Don’t worry. You’re going to be OK.’”
They waited for him to continue. But he didn’t. He just peered down at his plate with that look. Dreamy. Modest.
Once again it was Sally who reacted first. She clasped both hands over her mouth as if trying to stifle herself, then squealed back deep in her throat and said, “It was an angel! He was an angel!”
Fran barked out a laugh, and Douglas laughed briefly, too, but then sat with a look of tormented indecision. Was it a joke? Should he laugh? What should he say?
They all looked at Perry. He shook his head very slowly, then gazed upward and said, “I kind of thought he was God.”
*
None of them knew what to say, how to act around Perry.
Well, Sally thought she did. Over the rest of that day and the next she couldn’t stay away from him, treated him like he was some precious, fragile thing, taking cups of her favorite herbal tea out to him in his shop, speaking to him in low, reverential tones, even running her hand gently over his balding head until Fran shouted at her, “Oh, get over yourself! You’re just trying to turn this into more of your New Age crap!” And Sally, with a look of a martyr persecuted for yet sustained by her faith, ascended to her attic room.
Douglas spoke not a word the rest of that day, nor the next morning before school, nor after he came home that afternoon, communicating only in nods and gestures. Was he turning into another Halo? “Don’t make any more out of this than it is,” Fran told him. “It’s just a thing, that’s all. It’ll pass.” Douglas nodded.
Halo—well, who knew? Was it Fran’s imagination, or did she, the happiest of them all, seem more subdued, thoughtful—if a not-quite-five-year-old can be said to be thoughtful?
Fran, least of all, knew what to think, how to react. Perry wasn’t a man to lie, so she believed his story about seeing the man and what the man said. But that other stuff. An angel? God? Please. Perry was a practical, everyday, down to earth, nuts and bolts kind of guy. For him to imagine that, well, it had to be a sign of how desperate, how frightened he was. Perry, her solid man, afraid of death.
*
That next afternoon, Fran picked the kids up at school and once home made a pan of cornbread and put a pot of white beans on to cook. She’d be at work by the time it was ready to eat, but Douglas could be relied upon to get the dinner on the table.
When it came time for her to leave for Rustlers, though, she did something she’d done only a couple of times in all the years she’d worked there: she called in sick. She felt like she needed to stick close to home, close to Perry.
At 5:00 Fran sent Halo out to the shop to bring her dad in for dinner. When they got back in, she told Halo to go up and bang on Sally’s door, just in case Her Majesty decided to grace them with her presence.
While they waited, Fran and Douglas began breaking up slices of cornbread on their plates and ladling on steaming beans. Perry, though, just sat there with his hands flat on either side of his plate, that look on his face. Fran thought of that famous painting, the one of Jesus and the apostles at the last supper. Do you think you’re Jesus, now? she felt like saying. But she didn’t. She wanted to be exasperated, but she wasn’t. She didn’t know what she was.
Halo came to the table, and Sally swept in behind her. Douglas fixed Halo’s plate for her. Sally helped herself. Perry sat there.
Then Perry took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The others stopped eating, sat as frozen as those figures in that painting.
“Out in the shop, Halo spoke to me,” he said. “She told me it was all true, that I was going to be all right.”
Sally made a sound that might have been a sob and then asked, “The man. Was he an angel—or God? Did she tell you that?”
Halo put a spoonful of beans in her mouth. She ate her beans and cornbread separately, not all mashed together like the rest of the family.
Perry didn’t answer but began to eat while the others turned to Halo and waited for her to speak again, Douglas with a look on his face like it was all he could do to keep from shouting, Talk! Talk! So I won’t have to! At the same time, Sally’s eyes began to brim just as her heart no doubt was overflowing with this affirmation of her New Age faith, whether Halo ever spoke again or not. Fran, though . . .
Fran believed that Perry had never lied before, not even when he said he thought it might be God speaking to him on that parking lot, but he might be lying now. Why would he lie, though, and why this particular lie? Unless it was to ease her of her worrying, at least a little, at least until the worrying couldn’t be helped. A lie for love, then.
She didn’t know what to say to him, so she said nothing until that night when she found him sitting on the edge of their bed, one sock dangling from his hand, lost in thought.
She put her hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
“Sally and Douglas are waiting to hear Halo talk again, but you know,” she said. “I was thinking, I don’t know, I was thinking that she may never talk again, that she was sent here to speak to you just that one time. In case you were still worrying.”
He reached up and patted her hand as if he understood.
If he did, it was more than Fran could claim. In fact, later, lying in the dark and telling herself that this was the first time she’d ever lied to her husband, she wasn’t even sure that she had.
BIO
Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.
